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New Fabric Generates Electricity Via Your Body Heat

This isn’t your father’s beakers and test tube science.

Scientists and a graduate student, Core Hewitt, at Wake Forest’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials say they’ve made a material that can turn heat from your body into an electrical current.

The new material is called Power Felt. Ok, so that’s the name for us regular folks, but it’s really a multi-layered carbon nanotube/polymer composite-based thermoelectric fabric. Power Felt is such a better name.

Power Felt is a promising new thermoelectric fabric. It’s made up of tiny carbon nanotubes locked up in flexible plastic fibers and made to feel like fabric that uses temperature differences to create a charge.

We waste a lot of energy in the form of heat. For example, recapturing a car’s energy waste could help improve fuel mileage and power the radio, air conditioning or navigation system,” Hewitt says. “Generally thermoelectrics are an underdeveloped technology for harvesting energy, yet there is so much opportunity.”

There are a lot of potential uses for Power Felt – charging mp3 players, cell phones, lining automobile seats to boost battery power and service electrical needs, insulating pipes or collecting heat under roof tiles to lower gas or electric bills, lining clothing or sports equipment to monitor performance. In addition, it can be applied to healthcare and medical monitoring as well.

For those of you who have a “Go bag” or a “Bug out bag”, it could be the ultimate addition. Alexandra Crabb, a Boston PR consultant and and native Mainer says if there was a disaster that crippled electronic devices, Power Felt is what we would want to have in that bag. “Let’s face it, we are all addicted to our devices and not many of us would know how to survive if they were effectively dead. But if there was a fabric that could sit in our emergency bag and power up a flashlight or a walkie talkie, it would be irresponsible not to have that.”

Seems the scientists agree. Through a press release, David Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials said: “Imagine Power Felt in an emergency kit, wrapped around a flashlight, powering a weather radio, charging a prepaid cell phone. Just by sitting on your phone, Power Felt could provide relief during power outages or accidents.”

Currently, 72 stacked layers in the fabric yield about 140 nanowatts of power (that’s 1. The team is evaluating several ways to add more nanotube layers and make them even thinner to boost the power output.